Interstellar Target Practice

nachoworld writes "One of the stars of the Pleiades cluster, Merope, has been running through the nebular cloud, IC 349, in what some scientists call an "interstellar bullet," since the star is tearing up the insides of the nebular cloud for us humans back on Earth to analyze. Read about it here. Hubble Space Telescope has caught some dramatic pictures."

Comments

Hubble Heritage

[bph]

I just wanted to point out that this picture, and many other cool ones, are brought to you by the Hubble Heritage project. The point of this project is to create an archive of both beautiful and scientifically useful pictures of things while Hubble still works.

They have done some cool stuff and I am glad that they are doing it (even if does mean a smaller chance my own proposals will get approved).

How much we have to learn

[mathboy69]

I was simply amazed by the "zooming in" MPEG of the evolving scene.

You've got to wonder how many people searched for how long to find something as localized as this in our view of the universe (parallel universes aside :). The universe is damn big!

-ck

"If vegitarians eat vegetables, beware of humanitarians."

More information on this at the NASA site

[nachoworld]

I have some more links for you few, but dedicated, people that read this page:

• The guys behind the discovery
• Their information on this project
• A good picture and some good background from Ast. Pic. o' Day

I recommend the last link for a quick fill.


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You know what I thought was cool?

[abhinavnath]

The way radiation pressure from Merope slowed down small dust particles, mimicing air resistance here on Earth.

Yeah, I know that's what you'd expect, but I just find it interesting how so many processes resemble each other, in spite of vastly different scales. (A tropical storm resembles a spiral galaxy etc. etc.)